The Shorebird and the Stormcrow
by Kintaraheart
Summary: Ra'taia, daughter of the traitor Zalazane, was spared when her father fell to Bwonsamdi. For years she has lived alone on the reclaimed Echo Isles as an outcast, feeling forever caged by her father's name and a tribe who refuses to accept her. When the Cataclysm floods the Echo Isles, she is given a chance to break the cage and takes it but where will the scattered pieces lead her?
1. Chapter 1

**Hello there. I decided to start writing an old story that had been lurking in the pages of my plans in for a long time until now. It was demanding to be written, so I obliged and came out with this first chapter. I have always had a fascination with Troll lore in WoW, as I've never really gotten to know much of it. This should be a very fun learning experience for me as I try to get things correct. that being said, please keep in mind that I don't know all that much about them besides the basics and some of the older history. Please try to be kind, suggestions would be wonderful.**

 **There will be an eventual pairing in this story between a female Troll and a male Night Elf. If this is not your thing then you can either give it a try or head on out because I don't like flames. Despite popular opinion, I've always found Troll girls in Warcraft to be quite pretty, just as I've found that Night Elf guys don't all have to look like 60 year old bodybuilders- not that there's anything wrong with that.**

 **Now, I give you Ra'taia.**

 **Please read and review :)**

 **P.S. I know I have too many stories, don't look at me that way.**

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It was the birds that she loved the most. The big, white-feathered coastal birds that swooped through the open skies over the coast of Durotar, that disappeared into clouds and reappeared like a piece of them. She watched them from the beach for hours, just standing and staring. When they landed it was always on Durotar, never on the Echo Isles, it made this place seem even more like a string of cages. She longed to be one of them, to sprout feathers in the dead of night or mid morning when the world warmed to life. White feathers, soft and fringed and salty from diving.

When she wasn't tracking birds with her eyes, she was on the other sides of the islands, watching the breakers come crashing onto the shore in curling turquoise masses of sand and seawater. Out beyond the breakers the rolling waves faded into nothing for thousands of miles. She would lock eyes with the horizon's gaze and be held transfixed. Sometimes a boat or ship or zeppelin would sever the connection, but never for long. Something from across the sea, from the far lands that old heroes and adventurers spoke of, pulled at her core and drew her nearer and nearer. More than once she'd been pulled from the jaws of the rough shorebreak by the patrolling guards and Shadow Hunters after she had unknowingly wandered closer and closer. They had all chastised her for her actions, calling her foolish and unwell. She ignored their words for never did they understand the magnetism of the horizon.

It did not matter what they told her, the harmful words spewing from their mouths, they'd labelled her years ago as crazy as they helped murder her father, Zalazane. When they found her curled behind a stand of curling fronds, they deemed her too young to kill. She was one of the few spared in their raid. The rest of the Darkspear took her in but she was never welcome in anyone's homes save for during storms, and so she slept outside even after the island villages were rebuilt. She ate what she found, only with the others during holidays. The other children either feared her or mocked her, it wasn't much different when it came to the adults. Some thought her cursed or dangerous or crazy, others despised her for her bloodline.

She had learned not to care. She had learned to take care of herself. She remembered what she could her the lessons her mother had taught her. She took up her days with braiding shells into her white hair and painting on her hands and arms with berry juice, staining designs into her sky-colored fur speckled with white like clouds, when she wasn't watching the skies. She made jewelry from shiny stones and shells and old plant husks and seeds and bones. She made a house nestled in the very frond stand she'd hid in years ago, a bed from an old tiger pelt that had holes worn in it, salt cleaned and sun bleached giant crawler shells used to collect rainwater and store her collected food, larger seashells for cups. She fashioned clothes from other discarded village things. The old leatherworker left out scraps and old bone needles and ruined or weak spools of thread. She had a fondness for collecting feathers and hanging them with thin roots she tore from the ground and used as rope. She had a skirt woven from long, narrow leaves, leggings of braided dunegrass, two shells held together with old fishhooks for a breastplate, sea-rope hanging in reverse arches to cover her stomach.

Her prize piece was the cloak- the last remaining piece of her former life- her mother's cloak woven from fine threads dyed dark blue, tiny white shells threaded into it like stars. All the other things had faded or been burned with the old village. She had come with the cloak, it was as much a piece of her as it was a remnant of her mother, like a second skin she wasn't willing to shed.

She had learned her lesson about stealing years ago. Once, during a particularly wet rainy season, she'd been unable to find a good amount of food and became so hungry that she'd swiped a piece of fruit from the hanging baskets outside the healer's hut. It had been too stormy for the fishing boats to go out often enough for there to be the leftovers that she normally picked over, too wet for much of the plants to bear fruit and not enough sunlight. Her stash of dried meat was near empty and she became desperate.

To her dismay the baskets had been spell-locked, allowing only the healer's hands to take fruit from them. She had been immediately burned, the fur singed from her bony fingers and the skin immediately blistering. She'd screamed from the pain of the burns and the healer had come running out. The healer, as punishment, wrapper her hand but refused to properly heal it. Thankfully the old woman did not take any further action and even let her keep the fruit- ruined as it was now- but she had learned her lesson, still bearing the scars on her right hand even after years.

She did not steal again, even when she had not had food in days, even during the drought two years back that lasted all through the warm season and through half the rainy season, even when she had run out of her supply completely. The drought had been by far the worst. No healthy plants to flower and bring fruit, leaves too withered to spare her from the cruelty of the angry sun, and no rain to bring relief to her dry lips. She'd spent most of her afternoons in the ocean on the calm side of the island, watching the few birds who'd stuck around in such a drought. The water cooled her skin, but she could only stay in so long before risking further dehydration. The rest of those days were spent beneath the only shade she could find in her frond stand, sipping from the dwindling, drying basin of water.

Eventually she'd wandered about the outskirts of the villages, daring even to swim between islands in search of scraps and water to spare. There was little to be found even on the unpopulated islands. A month passed and she was nearing her limit the day that relief finally came. She'd lay beneath the shade of her frond stand, overlooking the path leading to the main village. There was little left of her besides skin and bone and stringy hair. Apparently, thankfully, wonderfully the drought had attracted the attention of the Orcish chieftain whose name she so often heard flitting out from between the lips on the villagers. _Thrall_ they called him. An Orc, of course, tall and green with tusks that stuck straight up like a woman's and black braids, a shaman.

Or so the people said, she had yet to see. It was hard to trust the word of those who refused to trust you in return. The only voices she'd found to bring about truth were those of nature and of the spirits. It was the spirits who warned her mother that they would all burn, that her husband would be slaughtered, that the islands would be retaken. All those things happened. It was nature who offered her a bed and a home where no others would even let her in the door of their huts. And so, when the shaman and the healer and the priestesses and priests all said that the spirits were angry, she believed them. Their wrath had certainly been apparent.

She'd been reduced to the point of begging by then. Too tired to lift herself from her frayed pelt, she'd lain there alone, only moving to harass anyone who came down the well-worn trail. But not one had come in a day and a half. Not a hunter, not a fisherman, not even a Shadow Hunter on patrol. The lack of life made her convinced that the Loa would be her only visitors when the end came. Bwonsamdi coming to deliver the final blow.

Then came the footsteps, many of them, and she wondered for a moment if a pack of wild raptors who also suffered from this drought hadn't ventured near to the village in hopes of catching hold a straggler _like her_. But the footsteps seemed wrong, far too messy and loud, as if whoever it was stumbled and possessed no grace. It certainly was no Shadow Hunter or raptor or god of death, that she could be sure of.

The steps came from the other side of her stand, not from the path as she'd initially suspected. Now she willed herself to sit, suspicious of the footsteps and the rustling. Suddenly four large bodies came stumbling out from the thick tangle of jungle and into the little clearing in which her frond stand grew at the base of a tree. At the sound of grunts and rumbling voices she crawled from her stand both desperate and curious. The men she saw, and the creature with them, were like none she'd seen before, but still she knew exactly what they were. For what else could they be?

Three Orcs and a _Direwolf_ stood in her clearing, sweating and frazzled with twigs sticking out of their wiry braids. Like the stories said they were thick-bodied and broad with skin of varying degrees of sickly green and tusks that indeed stuck straight up like the tusks of a child or woman, like her own, only much bigger. One was missing an ear, another had his bottom lip pierced in three places, but their strangest features were the seemingly unnecessary number of fingers they had- five on each hand- and the fact that they fully covered their feet. The wolf was white, tusked like the orcs, and had a heavy saddle upon its back with many bags hanging from it.

Four pairs of eyes stared down at the malnourished troll girl who in turn stared back at them. One of them crouched down beside her and spoke softly. The words were harsh and foreign and she wrinkled her nose in confusion. One of the others, the one missing an ear, seemed to notice and said something to his two companions. The kneeling Orc moved aside as the pierced one took his place and spoke to her in Zandali.

"Little one, surely you know the way to the village?" His voice was deep and dark, and even when he spoke Zandali it sounded too rough to her ears.

She flinched back a bit when he attempted to smile at her but nodded and rose as steadily as she could manage. She shook as she walked from her fronds to the path only a few feet away and motioned for them to follow. She knew the way by heart, not even bothering with the markers and torches that foretold the way to the main village.

She said nothing as they walked until the pierced one asked, "Who are you, child, and what are you doing out so far from the village?"

For a moment she she considered not answering him. She wondered if they knew of Zalazane, of her father, if they knew the burden of his name. She supposed that it would make no difference if they did. Either way, whether or not they knew, what more harm could they do? Deny her food and water? The villagers were already sure to do that once the Orcs delivered it to them anyway. She was never one of them, hardly a Darkspear at all. She was an outcast, a victim of her people's superstitions, at times she hardly even felt like a Troll at all.

She dragged her malnourished feet over the vines and sandy soil, "I am Ra'taia, daughter of Zalazane, outcast." She heard the pierced Orc stop for a moment but ignored him and continued on.

"Zalazane? The traitorous necromancer who enslaved half the Darkspear? That monster of a Troll was your father?" He seemed to rush for a moment to catch up with her, his meaty hand landing on her shoulder. She attempted to shrug it off only for him to grasp her arm. He spun her around to look at him. She stared up at him defiantly, bitterly, nervously as he stared back expectantly.

"You have nothing to fear, I'm only confirming what you said." He said steadily. Finally she relented, nodding ever so slightly, and he let go. She stared at the ground for a moment and felt her cheeks burn with anger and a shame she couldn't quite place.

She heard him say something to his companions in Orcish and receive a few mumbled replies. She stared at the ground, focused on her steps, watched the vines curled around the few stones in the path. In that moment of feeling especially hostile nature came to her rescue yet again and calmed her like the trickling of streams in the regular rainy season when water was actually present and the world wasn't brown and dry. She found herself taking care not to step on the small sproutlings and tiny shoots of baby trees that struggled to stay alive in this drought and would surely break if she stepped on them.

"I had never heard of Zalazane having a daughter," The pierced Orc said wonderingly. She continued on her path of ignoring him. "I can't imagine any child having a good life with him for a father."

In that moment her emotions got the better of her and she wanted to lash out at him. She was tired of hearing the same thing from everyone's mouth when in the end no one truly cared what her life was like- now or then. She looked to the vines for help again, an escape, a sedative. Before long they were at the village gates and Shadow Hunters came to greet the Orcs. She allowed herself to be brushed aside as always.

Words were exchanged in both Orcish and Zandali, the packs were unloaded from the wolf's saddle, food and waterskins handed out to the villagers. Fruit, dried fish and meat, vegetables, medicinal herbs, berries. It was too much to watch knowing she would never get her hands on any of it no matter how much begging she did. She turned away, finding a mossy, fallen tree that looked inviting a few yards away. The moss crunched beneath her as she sat down, a testament to how much of a toll the drought had taken on the islands. She fiddled with the shells on her breastplate for a little while, trying her hardest to ignore the events unfolding as she rested. She just wanted to regain her strength and wander back to the fronds, lay down on her dirty tiger pelt and sleep until she died. There was no point in lingering here where she was unwanted.

She tried to get a grasp on what it would mean to go back with no food or water. She would have no strength after this final venture, nothing left to go on besides the fruitless desperation of the dying. She wondered if she was ready to accept that but couldn't bring her mind to understand in that moment. It was too much work. Just as she rose and turned back to the path that would lead back to the frond stand, the meaty five-fingered hand fell on her shoulder again.

"Where are you going, girl? Don't you want anything to eat or drink? You'll starve to death at this rate." She was surprised by the concern in his gruff voice.

She shook her head and her raggedy, white braids fell in her face. "It's not for me," She murmured, "I am the outcast."

She tried to walk away and found a repeat of earlier as he grabbed her arm. "If you do not eat you will die," He stated matter-of-factly. "Wait here."

She did, feeling almost too tired to walk on anyway. Just when she was about to sit from the strain of standing, the pierced Orc returned and placed an entire heavy pack on her shoulder. She almost toppled from the sudden added weight but he caught her by the arm and helped her to stand straight, turning her around again. She stared up at him in wonder at his kindness. It was the first time since her mother's death that another being had shown her anything but hostility or fear without there being a catch. It nearly brought on tears.

"No one can help who they are born from." He said and patted her on the head as gently as any Orc could ever be capable of. In that moment she decided that she liked him.

She practically ran back to the frond stand, new hope in her heart, a renewed longing to leave the Echo Isles. In the safety of the fronds she opened the pack. Inside were four full waterskins, a pack of dried meat and fish, six Tel'abim bananas, and two small Snapvine watermelons. It was enough food to keep her alive for a month. She ate carefully, steadily so as not to shock herself, and poured one of the waterskins out around her fronds, determined to keep her alive and give something back to nature. She truly slept well and content for the first time in nearly two weeks. The next day she was back on the beach to stare at the mainland.

A week later it rained, and continued to rain for three days straight before returning to a normal cycle. It still was not as much as normal, certainly far from being a downpour, but it had been enough that after a week and a half the islands were green again and the seabirds returned. As did the longing, and it was more intense than ever.

Now, two years later, the beckoning song of Wanderlust was ringing in her ears, echoing in her very thoughts, possessing every dream she had. She had to leave, she had to find her place in the world, escape the Echo Isles once and for all.

And so there she was, watching the sun set behind the mountains and ridges of mainland Durotar to the west as small waves lapped against her sandal-less feet, eyeing the soaring birds as they came to finish their fishing for the evening before retiring to wherever it was that shorebirds retired. Soon enough, with the fading light, she returned to her own little nest in the fronds.

That night her sleep was restless and her dreams were plagued by screams and fire, a creature so large that it blocked out the sun as it soared over her home and spread destruction beneath great, leathery wings.

The next day, Deathwing the Destroyer ripped open the world and Ra'taia awoke to her world being swallowed whole.


	2. Chapter 2

**Hello again. It has been _way too long_ since I've paid attention to this story. It's funny because this story is on my mind quite a bit and I only published one chapter over a year ago, yet I think about it so often.**

 **Hopefully, you all haven't entirely given up on me yet lol.**

 **Here I give to you the second chapter.**

 **...It just occurred to me that I need to put a disclaimer.**

 **Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Not this world, not its lore, not its people. I think I only have about ten dollars to my name in real life so... This is _definitely not_ mine.**

 **Enjoy!**

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Water. It came so suddenly, flooding every inch of her mouth and her throat, her eyes, her ears. Cold and terrible, thrashing. She was whipped from her bed and tossed among the treetops, floating for a moment over her frond stand. She took a last look at it, trying to grasp what was happening. Her things were thrown about, floating in the water beside her. Carved shells and pebbles making a rainbow stream in the water, the large tree beside her stand was torn out of the ground, vines curled languidly toward her like the tentacles of a giant sea monster. Suddenly the stillness whipped into action again as the currents picked up and she was flung backward by the pulling water.

Her hands searched for something to grasp but everything she found was ripped out of them, cutting her palms and scraping the pads of her fingers. The water became muddy just as she passed what could only have been the shoreline, tidecrawlers and fish joining her, flung about like leaves in the wind. Dark shadows floated by, pieces of buildings she realized as one of the Darkspear banners tangled about her legs. She tried to swim for the surface but struggled to find it in the panic that came over her. The water flooded her lungs, her legs trapped by the twisted banner, arms caught in the ropes of her breastplate and the ties of her mother's cloak, in her own hair. She screamed out into the water, the burning in her lungs almost too much to take as the air left her.

The water around her darkened further, though whether it was from the mud or the lack of oxygen in her body that blackened her vision, she couldn't tell. She was being sucked down now and no amount of fighting the undertow helped, futile as it was in the first place. For all her experience of getting caught in the shorebreak she could not save herself. The world around her had gone completely black and she drifted along in the water, the currents apparently calmer here. She felt herself occasionally bumping along what had to be the bottom, the earth, rock scraping hard against her skin. The burning had ceased in her lungs and now she only felt tired, heavy from the weight of shock, her limbs like lead and her head deadweight.

She closed her eyes only to find that it was just as dark inside her head. The rushing sound of the currents and the bubbling as she was dragged through the water dimmed under the ringing in her ears, her heartbeat taking over with slow, deliberate thumps that came less and less as the seconds were worn away. And then there was light, bright and warm behind her eyelids, her veins crisscrossing over her vision. She opened them to stare up at the sky, bright and blue, lined by a wall of red and black clouds. It was beautiful and terrifying, she had seen nothing like it.

Fire rained from the sky.

The water receded completely and left her there, beached like some creature from the deep. Suddenly there was a figure standing over her, tall and broad, blocking out the last of the sun. Bwonsamdi, her mind whispered. She welcomed death, she was too tired not to.

The figure kneeled beside her but as the smoke and clouds came to darken the sky, she still could not make out their features. There were hands on her chest, large and calloused. They pressed on her repeatedly, pumping against her so hard that she was sure her ribs would snap under the pressure. But they didn't and suddenly she felt herself gagging and choking again, gasping as the water in the lungs and stomach forced itself out and air forced itself in. She was turned onto her side as the rest came out, blood and seawater mixing on the ground beside her. The burning was back worse than before and she let out a hoarse sob that had nearly no sound to it, her voice and her throat were so tattered.

She felt herself become weightless as she was scooped up from the ground and carried, resting in the crook of the figure's arm like a small child would their mother. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to move, it hurt to see, and still her ears rung jarringly. Her heartbeat was frantic now, and with each beat came an unbearable pressure that made her eyes sting further and brought on hiccupping gasps and coughs. She clung tiredly to the figure's shoulder and shivered despite the intense heat of summer and the fire and ash that fell from the clouds.

The figure, who was obviously not Bwonsamdi, she realized, was running and her vision bounced with his every step. She drifted between consciousness and emptiness. As her eyes closed, the ringing in her ears was quieted for a moment and she noticed that for all the chaos that had just ensued, the world was oddly, eerily silent. All that could be heard was the crackling of flames in the wind.

The world of dreamless sleeps took her. As she floated through her watery mind into the waiting emptiness, a roar split open the sky on the other side of the veil, but she was too far gone to hear it.

It had been many years since Ra'taia slept in a real bed, or even anything beyond her patchy tiger pelt. Yet here she was beneath a thick, woven blanket on a fur-stuffed mattress. Her body ached and her throat was dry but she was safe and alive. Her mother's cloak was draped over the end of the bed, her breastplate lay beside it, but her leggings and skirt were nowhere to be found. She'd been dressed in dry clothes, a simple grey-dyed, sleeveless dress and for the first time many years she had underwear.

Her body was peppered with bandages, around her hands and her rib cage especially. She had not particularly remembered injuring anything besides her insides when the flood came through, but apparently she had. Breathing stung and her throat was dry, her body felt hollow.

As she went to sit, her ears adjusted to the sounds around her and her eyes adjusted to the light coming from the torch at the foot of her bed along the wall. Slowly more of the room because visible and as her head felt less heavy, she began to look around. She'd never been in a building quite like this before. The walls and floor were all of grayish stone and the ceiling above her was high and rough with supporting beams and a hole in the middle like the inside of a large hut. It appeared to be entirely one room with small beds and storage spaces carved into the walls, a large fire pit set into the floor in the center of the space, and standing beds and hammocks arranged in a ring along the walls.

There probably would have been an abundance of leftover space, too, if not for the dozens of people lying on mats strewn across the floor. There were Orcs and Trolls everywhere, some sitting, some lying down, one of them crying hysterically. Others were crying too, most of them children, but none were quite as loud as the Troll woman by the wide door to the building.

"My children!" She wailed repeatedly, clutching her long, blue braids and yanking them hard as she wept. Ra'taia looked away, fighting the nauseating lump that was rising in her throat. Panic and terror gripped her as she remembered the flood, the buildings floating past her in the water, the Darkspear banner tangling around her legs, the burning, the drowning, being rescued... She wondered just how many had not made it, how many were not so lucky. She closed her eyes, feeling sickened at the loss of life. These people may have treated her badly, but she had never wished ill upon them and certainly never had she wished death upon anyone. It was too much...

The brief absence of sight as she tried to calm herself backfired, allowing the sounds echoing off the walls to prevail and encroach, overwhelming her. The wailing and the hushed and hiccuping cries of the afraid and of those in mourning, the nearly-yelling frantic voices that called across the room to one another, the drone of nervous chatter, the moaning of the injured. For a moment she was so enthralled by it all that she was unable to open her eyes, to do anything but listen and be absorbed.

When she could finally wrench her eyes open again, she dove for her mother's cloak to pull it around herself. She tried to find somewhere to look, afraid to close her eyes again, but also afraid to see. Finally she settled on the doorway. What she saw outside caught her eye in the worst of ways.

She did not know where she was but she assumed that had to be Durotar's mainland, and though she had never set foot here before, she knew from her years of watching that the sky was never blood red. She shivered even with the cloak around her shoulders.

Minutes came and went and faded into an hour as she stared up at the sky, which should have been the only familiar thing in this new place, watching as it turned from red to orange. She wondered what time it was, if it was day or night, but it was impossible to tell. The clouds blocked out the sun and the fire within still burned and fell. From where she sat on her bed she could see that some of the surrounding buildings outside burned as well. People rushed everywhere, wielding buckets of water. She watched as an Orc shaman tried to call upon a water elemental, only for his spell to die in his hands.

The world itself, the spirits and the elements too, was in chaos. Even now, over the din of the panicked Trolls and Orcs she could hear the frantic whispers of the spirits around them. It scared her. The spirits themselves were so torn by this tragedy, the elements in such upheaval, Ra'taia wondered what could be the cause of such terror.

Perhaps one of the Loa was angry, perhaps this was why even the spirits seemed afraid. Slowly she stood, transfixed in her terror and stumbled toward the door of the building. Bandaged hands gripping the stone door frame, hot wind whipping her braids about her face, she fought more tears. Everything she had, however little it was, was gone. Her little grove had been torn to pieces by the waves, she had been witness to its destruction. Her family was long dead, she had been witness to their deaths, too. Now the world burned and she had nothing but her cloak and breastplate, the little shells woven into her hair, and her memories.

She had finally made it to the mainland and now as the flames further devoured the surrounding buildings and bit at the roof of the one in which she took shelter, she would die. She would die never having seen all she'd dreamed of seeing, she would die surrounded by so many people yet so very alone, she would die never having known true freedom, never having known life...

It infuriated her. This could not be it. This could not be her life, her end, her fate. Nature had always been with her, the Loa always had a hand on her shoulder even when her people left her to die. Someone had pulled her from the shore, had purged the water from her lungs, had saved her, dressed her, and bandaged her wounds. She would not waste this chance.

She, Ra'taia, daughter of Zalazane, outcast- was here on the mainland, finally free of the Echo Isles and the invisible chains that her people had placed upon her. She was going to _live_.

Before she could even register what was happening, rich green light surrounded her. It wrapped itself around her limbs and curled its way through her mouth and into her lungs, healing her from the inside out. Her bruises faded and her cuts closed, it no longer stung when she drew a breath. She was rejuvenated, empowered, free. The world around her slowed as she walked, the bandages falling away beneath her dress. She was consumed with serenity, a deep tranquility that swallowed the chaos around her. As she made her way toward the well where people were frantically filling buckets of water, she placed a hand upon the shoulder of an Orc who sat slumped against the side of the building in pain, his skin burned in several places. She watched as the burns faded and his eyes lit up with understanding as they met hers. Together they went to the well and took up buckets.

It must have taken hours but eventually the last of the flames began to die and the sky faded into familiar, inky indigo as the burning clouds moved on into the west. In the end she stood, her earlier trance at last fading, where she had earlier, leaning against the stone door frame and watched the many other disoriented and exhausted people mill about the streets. As the trance-like spell that had overtaken her receded, she too felt the exhaustion sinking its teeth into her. She sat down on the steps, curled up against the stone and closed her eyes.

That night she dreamed a dream like none other.


End file.
